Videotaped Lessons as a Chinese Immersion Teacher Training Tool

By Lelan Miller 孟乐岚

One of the many challenges of being a Chinese immersion teacher is finding opportunities to observe others teaching immersion Chinese. Observations are an integral and important part of student teaching in any field and especially more so in the relatively new field of Chinese immersion teaching. Many teaching strategies and methods to teach Chinese in immersion education are different from those used in non-immersion settings; therefore it is extremely important for the immersion educator to see successful examples of language lessons for that particular instructional setting.

Observing experienced and trained model teachers of immersion Chinese should not be limited only to the student teaching phase. Neither should observation opportunities be limited solely to the site administrators.  Opportunities to observe should be provided and encouraged many times throughout the teacher’s career, whether the observing teacher is a novice or an experienced educator. Immersion school program administrators should also avail themselves of opportunities to observe lessons along with their program teachers so as to enhance discussions and teacher development upon return to the home campus.

Because immersion programs are scattered throughout the US, observations in live settings in real time are not always possible due to the cost and time constraints involved in traveling to a model immersion site. Thereupon this task often falls to the administrator of the immersion program to do the traveling and observing of pedagogical methods in the site to be visited.

Videotaped demonstration lessons are an appropriate means of delivering lessons to the observer. They can be observed anytime and anywhere thereby reducing the amount of instructional time lost due to the requirement of traveling to a distant site.

The Utah Dual Language Immersion has several teaching demonstrations on video available on their website under the Startalk 2013 tab at http://utahchineseimmersion.org/startalk/startalk-2013/

There is a particularly good demonstration lesson within the Utah Dual Language Immersion site at http://www.bizvision.com/webcast/prod/43357?group_stream_idx=2904